The mom lived for 42 years in a three-story home overlooking a former gasoline chamber and a gallows at Auschwitz, generally shedding sleep on the considered what had occurred on the opposite facet of her backyard wall.
However the home in Oswiecim, southern Poland, as soon as the house of the dying camp’s wartime commandant, Rudolf Höss, was “an amazing place to lift youngsters,” mentioned Grazyna Jurczak, 62, a widow who raised two sons there.
The house, the topic of the Oscar-winning film “The Zone of Curiosity,” had “security, silence, a fantastic backyard,” quick access to a river throughout the street and, in winter, area for an ice-skating rink for her two boys, she mentioned.
Alone in the home after her husband died, she lastly determined to go away. One motive, she mentioned, was that she was disturbed by individuals who, after watching “The Zone of Curiosity,” had been tramping by her backyard, peering by her home windows and reminding her of her house’s connection to the Holocaust.
Final summer season, Ms. Jurczak agreed to promote the house to the Counter Extremism Venture, a New York-based group that wishes to open the home to guests. She moved out in August, and in October the New York group accomplished its acquisition of the house and an adjoining home constructed after the conflict.
“I needed to get out of there,” Ms. Jurczak mentioned at her new house in a contemporary condo block in Oswiecim, a mile from her former home. She declined to say how a lot the home was offered for, however indicated that it was considerably greater than the property’s estimated worth of round $120,000.
Mark Wallace, a lawyer and former U.S. diplomat who’s the chief government of the Counter Extremism Venture, additionally declined to offer the value, saying solely that his group “wished to do proper” by Ms. Jurczak’s household however “didn’t need to pay a giant premium for a former Nazi property, even when we might.”
Now the home, at 88 Legionow Avenue, simply outdoors the camp’s perimeter fence, is being ready to obtain visits by the general public for the primary time, as a part of commemorations for the eightieth anniversary of the Soviet Military’s liberation of Auschwitz.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, a Polish establishment in Oswiecim dedicated to the remembrance of Nazi victims, will probably be internet hosting dozens of world leaders on Jan. 27.
On the home, employees employed by the brand new house owners have eliminated 14 dumpsters of particles and stripped away wallpaper and different postwar additions. That has left the property a lot because it was when the Höss household lived there from 1941 to late 1944, together with the Nazi-era lock on the lavatory door studying “frei/besetzt.,” German without cost/occupied.
A mezuzah, a parchment containing biblical verses, has been hooked up to the entrance door body to honor Jewish custom — and repudiate the fanaticism of its former occupant, the Auschwitz commander. After the conflict, Commandant Höss recalled how the profitable experimental gassing of Russian prisoners in 1941 “set my thoughts at relaxation, for the mass extermination of the Jews was to begin quickly.”
He was hanged in 1947 at a gallows positioned between his former house and a Nazi crematory.
On a desk in a downstairs nook room that Commandant Höss used as a house workplace lies a heap of torn and crumpled Nazi-era newspapers and different wartime artifacts discovered after the home was offered. There may be additionally a espresso mug, embossed with the seal of the SS, and German beer bottles.
Retrieved from the attic, the place they’d been stuffed to dam a gap, had been the striped trousers as soon as worn by an Auschwitz prisoner. Researchers are attempting to work out who wore them by deciphering a light prisoner quantity, written subsequent to a small purple triangle signifying that the wearer was a political prisoner and an almost vanished yellow star designating a Jew.
“This home has been closed for 80 years. It was out of attain to the victims and their households. Lastly, we are able to open it to honor survivors and present that this place of unbelievable evil is now open to all,” Mr. Wallace mentioned.
The plan, Mr. Wallace mentioned, is to show the home, together with the adjoining property, into the Auschwitz Analysis Heart on Hate, Extremism and Radicalization, a brand new group that may work to increase the pledge of “By no means Once more” from historic reminiscence to present motion.
Piotr Cywinski, a Polish historian and director of the Auschwitz-Birkanau Museum since 2006, mentioned his state-run establishment wished to protect its core mission of remembrance however noticed worth in supporting a undertaking targeted on the current and future, in addition to the previous.
“Preventing towards at present’s actuality is simpler for an NGO than for a state establishment,” he mentioned, lamenting the rise throughout Europe of populism, which he calls “the most cancers of democracy.”
The brand new heart will embody the complete territory of Commandant Höss’s wartime property, together with an extended sealed-off backyard space the place he met with Hitler’s safety chief, Heinrich Himmler, Josef Mengele, the “angel of dying” physician, and different Nazi dignitaries tasked with exterminating Jews. Daniel Libeskind, an American architect, has been commissioned to revamp the property.
Mr. Libeskind mentioned he had drawn up preliminary plans that envisage turning the inside of the home into “a void, an abyss” — the exterior partitions are protected by a UNESCO preservation order — and the development of a brand new partly buried construction in a backyard space with assembly rooms, a library and a knowledge heart.
Greater than two million individuals go to the previous Auschwitz camp annually and, the architect mentioned, come away “horrified and mesmerized by dying” but in addition want “to interact with up to date antisemitism and different extremism in our political tradition.”
Jacek Purski, the director of a Polish anti-extremism group, who’s concerned within the undertaking, mentioned he needs to make use of the home and the previous Nazi horrors as a weapon towards what he sees as a resurgence of extremist ideologies.
“A home is a home,” Mr. Purski mentioned, looking of a second-story window of the previous Höss home towards the chimney of a former Nazi crematory. “However it’s in uninteresting, common homes like this the place extremism is occurring at present.”
Ms. Jurczak, the previous proprietor, mentioned she nonetheless struggles to reconcile glad, unusual reminiscences of the home with its grotesque previous.
Reminiscing about her household’s time there she instantly stopped herself: “I fear that I sound like Ms. Höss,” she mentioned, referring to the commandant’s spouse, Hedwig Höss. Within the film, Ms. Höss gushes about her Polish house as “paradise” and is proven attempting on a fur coat stolen from a prisoner despatched to slaughter by her husband.
The commandant’s spouse, Ms. Jurczak determined after watching the film, “was even perhaps worse than her husband,” in her indifference to human struggling.
Whereas awaiting execution in a Polish jail after the conflict, Mr. Höss, the previous commandant, wrote an autobiography that Primo Levi, the Italian author and Auschwitz survivor, described because the work of a “drab functionary” who “developed step-by-step into one of many best criminals in historical past.”
The home the place Mr. Höss lived was constructed between the 2 nice wars of the final century by a Polish navy officer serving in an adjoining military camp, which was seized by the Nazis after their 1939 invasion of Poland and become an extermination manufacturing facility. No less than 1.1 million males, girls and youngsters had been murdered there, principally in gasoline chambers.
Grabbed by the SS as a house for the Auschwitz commandant, who modified the road quantity to 88, a numerical code for Heil Hitler, the home was returned to its unique proprietor after the conflict and later offered to the household of Mr. Jurczak’s husband, who owned it till final yr.
Mr. Cywinski, the Auschwitz-Birkanau museum director, mentioned he was wanting to work with the Counter Extremism Venture, in its efforts to fight extremism.
Extremism, he mentioned, “is sadly not a psychological sickness; it’s a technique” that exploits widespread emotions of frustration.
Strange individuals with unusual ambitions, he added, can flip into monsters.
Mr. Höss, he mentioned, “was an exquisite father to his children and, on the identical time, the principle organizer of probably the most brutal killings within the historical past of the world.”
Anatol Magdziarz contributed reporting from Warsaw.
